Android adware that MUST NOT BE NAMED threatens MILLIONS

A popular mobile ad library used by multiple Android apps poses a severe malware threat, researchers at infosec firm FireEye have warned. The security researchers said that altogether 200 million affected apps had been downloaded.

This ad library aggressively collects sensitive data and is able to perform dangerous operations such as calling home to a command-and-control server before downloading and running secondary components on demand.

Mobile ad libraries are third-party software included by host apps in order to display ads. Because this library could potentially be used to conduct large-scale attacks on millions of users, FireEye refers to it anonymously by the code name “Vulna” rather than revealing its true identity.

An analysis of the most popular apps (those with over one million downloads) on Google Play reveals that 1.8 per cent of them used "Vulna". The potentially affected apps have been downloaded more than 200 million times in total.

Re: Android adware that MUST NOT BE NAMED threatens MILLIONS

YegorP wrote:

Thanks for posting this! It's a very interesting story and our threat researchers are currently investigating the threat.

Yegor,

I am pretty sure my phone is clean of that library, but please do let us know what the Threat Researchers find out about it, as well as how to tell if your phone has it on it for those of us who have a device too old to run the current Webroot Mobile!

Re: Android adware that MUST NOT BE NAMED threatens MILLIONS

Many security vendors have been marking ad providers as adware/malware for exhibiting similar behaviors. We already protect against many different ad libraries capable of the exact same behaviors described by FireEye.

Both, Google and the developer of the software have been notified about the threat.

Webroot identifies malicious behaviors and marks apps accordingly. In this case, FireEye already claims to have addressed the issue direcltly with Google themselves.

Re: Android adware that MUST NOT BE NAMED threatens MILLIONS

OK, I am not afraid of new installations.

My concern is in already installed applications which are NOT browsers. For instance Clean Master (very reputable Android cleaner, more than 10,000,000 downloads) that shows ads. How WSA will recognize that streamed ads are safe?